Frostmere | Provenance Research & Historical Curation

Frostmere is a research-driven vintage and antique brand built around one idea: an object is never just an object.

I source vintage postcards, antiques, and historical artifacts, then research them using open-source intelligence methods. Each item gets a full investigation: tracing origins, identifying people and places, cross-referencing newspaper archives, YouTube footage, social media, university collections, government records, and historical databases. For postcards, I also use the Scott Catalogue system for stamp identification and cross-reference eBay listings where other collectors have documented their own findings. The results are published as "Deep Dive in the Archive" stories on Substack and permanently archived on frostmere.co.

Published investigations include tracing an 86-year-old postcard from the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition (using period YouTube footage from the fair), documenting the town of Bingham Canyon that was swallowed by the world's largest open-pit copper mine (pulling from NASA earth data, USGS maps, seismic records, and university-acquired collections), and a personal connection to the Wright Brothers' 1903 flight, a date I share as my birthday, with a family deeply rooted in aviation and avionics.

The shop (frostmere.co) is organized into curated collections: Château Noire (authentic antiques and vintage), Moonforge (hand-designed pieces inspired by the past), The Reliquary (symbolic jewelry carrying meaning and myth), and Frostmere (modern finds shaped by old-world design). Research findings live permanently in The Archives.

I have 200+ vintage postcards in the pipeline, each one a potential deep dive. The process is the same whether I'm researching a $2 postcard or documenting fraud: find everything, verify it, tell the story.